meatmates
by DirigibleBoyKing
Summary: Sapphires for her earshells, opals for her belly, pearls for the bends of her wrists. Ruby/Anna.
Fingertips.

Touches rain-soft and blood-hungry. Touches with the singular brutality of ancient things fucking in the dark. Of horrified tenderness. Four A.M, Texas, a shack, middle of nowhere. Armageddon snapping at their heels.

Anna's hair glistens in the weak light from one broken window, russet faded all silver-sepia, spread ghoulish over the stained mattress. Naked. White limbs all splayed out, as if someone spread them with the tip of a hammer. Angels don't sleep, but she's sleeping. Or appearing to sleep. Ruby likes her like this, skin moon-blanched, limp as a corpse on a bare mattress in a bare shack on a bare patch of land in Texas because where the fuck else are an angel and a demon gonna go to stick their fingers in each other. She likes Anna's birch-bone fingers curled and twitching in unconsciousness, one arm thrown wide to reveal a wisp of black hair in the hollow of her underarm. Likes the mouth-bruised softness of her breasts, like fingerprints or old petals. The bitten-scratchy edges of fingernails. Eyelids fragile, bluish, like the veins mapping the mounds and hollows of her body. In some places they tinge her skin green, as if she's stuffed full of leaves on the inside.

Ruby's been around a while. She's been with more species than she has fingers, but this is different. It's not that Anna's innocent, exactly, of course she fucking isn't. But underneath all that shivering naked eerieness there's a curiosity, a curiosity that Ruby figures is probably why she Fell, and that's good. Because Ruby might not give a fuck about the colour of Anna's eyes but her blood is wet and red just like a girl's, the glint of exposed thighbone appalling, and they both make dying sounds. Sometimes she feels like when they have sex she's feeding Anna back that curiosity that she suckled out of her in the first place. Ruby just wants to straddle this person-shaped thing and peel its spine right out of its back, but Anna won't let her, bit her when she tried.

Angels have such sharp teeth.

Ruby has kind of a _thing_ for Anna's spine. How it twists under her skin-caul like a knotty white ribbon. The feel of it under her palm, arching, all that obscene strength tied up in knots as long long fingers tremble up cello-string ribs, as Anna's head falls back to expose the dovewhite underbelly of her straining throat.

It's not a question of dominance. It's not a question of loneliness. If it's about anything, it's about release; about setting free the faceless thing whose heart beats just behind her meatsuit's. And perhaps it's like that for Anna, too, though Ruby doesn't really know and honestly she doesn't care.

Anna's own passion is singular. She's fascinated by Ruby's true face. Sometimes they lie on their sides in the darkness and then Anna reaches out to touch what she cannot see. Fingers caressing her beak. Tracing the lashes of her seven lidless beetle-eyes, tiny as fish-scales. Babies' fleshy hole of her mouth, lipless and sucking.

Sometimes, Anna even takes control.

These moments are rare and they make Ruby afraid.

Anna winds her fingers round Ruby's wrists. She could use her Grace to do this and Ruby's not sure why she doesn't. Arms bent above her head; Ruby's on her back, pinned to the mattress, breasts pointing upwards, soft and exposed.

Anna bites into her own wrist like an apple, sinking her teeth into white flesh until they're stained. Blood spots the mattress. She reaches out one finger to draw on Ruby's naked body, and Ruby trembles. They've done this before.

Anna hushes her, bending over her body, hand going to tenderly cover the demon's mouth.

Here come the words. Aramaic. Hebrew. Sanskrit. Kurdish. Latin. Enochian burns the worst.

 _Sacred_ , she writes over Ruby's skin, writes until the blood begins to flake and the words have crisscrossed so many times that it's impossible to tell what they say even if you did speak all those tongues. _Sacred. Sacred._

In return, Ruby takes Anna under a bridge in Wisconsin. She lays the angel down naked in the snow, and reaches for the bag at her own hip. Anna's eyes are closed. It's daylight, but the bridge above them is deserted.

Ruby withdraws from her bag a necklace like a tapestry of rubies, and she clasps it round Anna's neck. Next come sapphires for her ears, opals for her belly, pearls for the bends of her wrists. Silver anklets and golden armbands. Violets and narcissus in her hair. Spinels and tourmalines and topazes. Amethysts fill the twin hollows of her hips.

Finally she withdraws a bracelet of emeralds like cats' eyes, and Ruby's eyelids only flicker before sliding closed again.

Ruby breaks the silver chain with one vicious tug. She slides the stones off and feeds them to Anna one by one, and Anna swallows them greedily, blindly, opening her mouth for each gem like a baby bird, almost hideous in her helplessness.

Kissing in warped silence. Empty-house silence. Wind eats at the roof slates. Rattles shutters.

'I don't get it,' she whispers one night across the expanse of mattress. Picks at a loose thread on its quilted surface. 'What the hell do you want from me, Anna? What are you doing fucking around in the dirt with some demon?'

For a while, nothing changes. Ruby stares into the darkness, tries to find the hum of absolute quiet beneath it. She feels strangely exposed, goosebumps raising on her meatsuit's skin.

Something alien breathes into the silence.

It feels- cold. In here. Like- chilly.

But Ruby never feels cold.

 _I don't know know know_ comes a voice, after the longest time. It's Anna's, but- not. Like a thousand other Annas are speaking beneath it. Ruby's true eyes are lidless and she wishes they weren't _. Maybe maybe_ comes that voice, an inexpressible gentleness feeding into it, _I just like like your meat meat meat_

Wing-shadows fold crazily over the walls. Like map contours. Or jigsaw pieces.


End file.
